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On the one hand, using a traditional narrative approach, this dissertation examines disco's historical trajectory from an underground movement to a mainstream phenomenon, and analyzes its relationships to American cultural and racial tensions during the 1970s and 1980s. On the other hand, this dissertation also departs from traditional historical approaches by emphasizing an archive of personal experiences, memories, and reflections produced over the last four decades by individuals, living and dead, whose creative expressions help give disco its definition. Each chapter is organized around the story of an individual DJ whose work and play reflected the broader disco landscape. Together, the anecdotal experiences of these DJs help to conjure a collective biography of disco, emphasizing the significance of disco not only as a "genre" of pop music, but as a larger reference point for shared, and sometimes contested, cultural experiences.

There has long been a critical consensus that the presiding mood of America in the late sixties and early seventies was one of pervasive social upheaval, with perpetual ‘crisis’ seeming in many ways the narrative rule. Contemporaneous critics such as Erich Fromm, David Riesman, and William Whyte, together with late-twentieth century writers, Michael Kimmel, Sally Robinson, and David Savran, congruently agree that the post-war American epoch connoted one of expeditious adjustment for white, middle-class men in particular. The specific aim of this thesis is, thus, to elucidate the ways in which the literary fiction of this period by authors John Cheever, James Dickey, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, and new journalist, Michael Herr, reflects a significantly increased concern for such alterations in the values and attitudes of contemporary cultural life through representations of modern American masculinities. Multiple liberation struggles, including Civil Rights, Feminism, and sexual politics, converged with core economic shifts that transformed the US from an industrial based to a consumerist model. For hegemonic masculinity, this is a transferal from ‘masculine’ industrial labour and the physically expressive body to ‘feminine’ consumerism. This study will first of all underline the extent to which fiction in this period registers those changes through the lens of a fraying of what was once a fortified fabric from which white, patriarchal power was normatively fashioned. What is most disrupted by the paradigm shifts of the era will appear, then, to be a monolithic, coherently bounded American masculinity. However, by way of an interrelated interpretation of contemporaneous feminist and Marxist theory, my research will subsequently show that, rather than being negated, the fabric of that dominant masculinity regenerated and reasserted itself, primarily through the fraught revival of a violent and mythologized hypermasculinity in mainstream US culture. Whether it is through the suburban maladjustment of Eliot Nailles and Paul Hammer, the fraudulent frontier ethic of Ed Gentry and Lewis Medlock, or the more perverse pugnacity of Lester Ballard and internalised racism of Cholly Breedlove, this thesis argues that, by the mid-seventies, numerous American novelists had sought to artistically magnify the ways in which fundamental changes in the patterns of national life were occurring – changes which are represented more often than not as damaging to the normative model of masculinity and the experiential consciousness of men.

Thesis advisor: Devin O. Pendas / This dissertation shifts our understanding of 1970s human rights activism from a minimalist politics of salvation to a maximalist commitment to kindred spirits. Scholars see the 1970s as the time when the internationalist dreams of the 1960s disappeared to be supplanted by the salvation of a few over the transformation of the root causes of society's ills. By contrast, this dissertation examines West German activism on behalf of Latin Americans chaffing under military rule in the 1970s as a campaign of international political solidarity by different means. Faced with an environment hostile to transnational solidarity at home and abroad, West Germans of varying political doctrines and Christian confessions, as well as exiles from Latin America, embraced a common language of human rights as they pursued their political agendas. Its neutralist and humanitarian overtones made "human rights" discourses appealing to activists with diverging political goals. This dissertation reinterprets human rights activism as a continuation of internationalist commitments at a time when the foundations for transnational solidarity eroded. Grassroots embrace of human rights occurred during a tense state of securitization provoked by left-wing terrorism in West Germany. With the West German state increasingly unwilling to stand up for human rights on the international stage, especially for leftist victims, or accept them as refugees, grassroots solidarity activists were compelled to embrace a discourse that the state would accept. The Chilean and Argentinean cases--the most prominent instances of state-perpetrated abuses in 1970s Latin America--prompted leftists, left liberals, trade unionists, and Christians to advocate for the admission of political refugees and the imposition of economic embargoes and sanctions. Chilean and Argentinean exiles advocated for political change in their countries, but were forced to utilize human rights rhetoric to escape the stigma accorded to left-wing politics. Conservatives embraced human rights argumentation against the military regime in Chile when the wave of repression reached their political partners of the Christian Democratic Party in Chile. Lacking similar partners in Argentina, West German Christian Democracy did not demonstrate interest in conditions there. The West German government responded to grassroots advocacy with a minimalist vision for human rights protection that emphasized private negotiations on behalf of select individuals, which was abhorrent to many grassroots activists. The embrace of human rights by grassroots activists occurred in a highly contested process of political defeats and realignments. It was not a turn to a new utopia. Drawing on research in state and civil society repositories in Europe and the Americas, as well as oral interviews, this dissertation offers a window into transnational political activism between West Germany and Latin America in the 1970s. It shows how activists from the left and the right, as well as government officials, arrived at different definitions of human rights and diverging strategies for protecting them. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse the configuration of gender in Giscardian France (1974-1981), as it is represented through the life and work of Patrick Dewaere. To this end, this thesis has the following three correspondent aims: first, to document and analyse the socio-political and historical contexts that influenced the configuration of gender during this period. Second, to position Dewaere in relation to the broader context of 1970s French cinema primarily in the form of contemporary stars with whom he worked – and the filmic representation of gender during this period. Third, to map and explore Dewaere’s on and off-screen life against these sets of contexts. By looking at Dewaere’s life in this way this thesis will not only present a critical response to the research question as it concerns gender identity but it will also fill a small gap in the current dearth of work that exists on 1970s French film.

In the early 1970s a collection of singer-songwriters, musicians, and music business operatives captured the imagination of a national audience and launched Austin's reputation as a powerful and prolific international music scene. At the beginning of this seminal decade, the songs, the sounds, and the identities that took shape in Austin's music venues, studios, and back rooms gained traction in the national marketplace by cultivating a cross-cultural, cross-generational musical hybrid that came to be known as "progressive country." This dissertation tells the story of this music scene and explains why it's a story worth recounting in the course of American popular culture. The story begins by focusing on the meaning and utility of a music scene. To this end, I review a series of scholarly scene studies in an attempt to identify common currents of "sceneness" that I contrast with my findings as a participant observer in the Austin musical scene from 1967 to the present. The study then surveys the extant sources on Austin's music history, a commonly accepted history that I'm calling the "creation myth." This "myth" is expanded by introducing new voices, new interpretations, and new developments that have been under emphasized or overlooked in previous accounts. This analysis establishes the foundation for the unifying theme of this study, a theme based on the seminal significance, power, and durability of the song in the Austin music scene. The song was the driving force behind Austin's remarkable climate of musical creativity. The study then focuses on the local scene of the late 1960s as a precursor to the decade of the singer-songwriters. This was a highly productive era in Austin's creative history and although overshadowed by the popular splash of the 1970s, this period provided the underpinnings for music making in Austin for years to come. In the next section, the song is revisited by examining its history and its role in Western culture. Stated simply, songs are important—songs matter. They may mean different things to different people and play different roles in different societies, but they are an essential component of civilization. The discussion then expands from the efficacy of the popular song to the essence of their creators by examining the early professional careers of three prominent Austin-based songwriters—Steven Fromholz, Michael Martin Murphey and Jerry Jeff Walker. Weighing the differences in their respective styles and considering their commonalities help illuminate the process by which the song permeated the creative fabric of the period. The dissertation then explores the creative output of the Austin music scene by focusing on what I'm calling "cultural products." Certainly the songs of the era are prime examples of cultural products and are addressed throughout the dissertation. In this final segment however, I single out four examples of cultural products that are rooted in the 1970s that have either played a notable role in the historical current of Austin music or that continue to contribute to American popular culture in the 21st century. / text

This thesis is an exploration into the interrelation of memory, defeat, exile and solidarity. The work will investigate the moment of the Chilean coup and the process of remembrance which followed within Britain. The thesis will demonstrate that the Chilean coup deeply influenced sections of British society and has since been mourned by competing and alternative memories. It will be argued throughout this thesis that there is no fixed correlation between the definition of a particular event as catastrophic, the sustaining of that definition within memory, and the quantum of human suffering that is produced. Instead the memory of defeat was constructed in Britain through an active process of organised solidarity and exile politics. Principally this work is a study into the creation, contestation and preservation of a memory of Chile within British groups and networks of exiles from 1973 onwards. The research is centred on a series of interviews with Chilean exiles in Britain, both those who remained in Britain and those who had since returned to Chile. Using oral history to record the memories of an overlooked group of grassroots Chilean exiles, the research will critically engage with these compelling narratives, in contrast to the existing literature which focuses on more elite exile figures. Although some historians have pursued related goals, with two archival studies focusing on Chile Solidarity Campaign in Britain, and separate works providing oral histories of Chilean exiles, this thesis will bridge these separate works and will combine oral history with archival research. The thesis will examine the differing memories Chilean exiles in Britain possessed. The individual exile memories discussed in this thesis are then integrated into a broader history of solidarity and British political history. It is argued that these memories can only be understood within the space in which they are formed, exploring the new context of British society which exiles interacted with. The thesis will then investigate the British Left's more theoretical response to the Chilean coup and how alternative memories were constructed, a relationship which has been academically ignored until now. The work will also examine more practical responses to the coup through the Chile solidarity movement, investigating both the rise of human right politics and labour movement solidarity with Chile. The thesis will argue that these responses to Chile provided a terrain in which exiles in Britain could reflect and understand their experiences. The research will then investigate the process of return for exiles into a transformed country which refused to discuss the recent past. Exiles interviewed for this research described their return to Chile as a 'second exile' as their memories of the Chilean past clashed with those in Chile who had experienced the same events. Finally, the thesis will explore the arrest of Pinochet in Britain in 1998. While there is a great deal of legal research on this event, the research here will situate the arrest within a broader history of solidarity in Britain. The arrest is used as a window in which to further examine the British memorialisation of the Chilean past and its changing nature.

This thesis analyzes the relationship between Joan Jonas’s 1976 videotape Good Night Good Morning and the existing historiographical discourse on video art from the 1970s. I begin with a careful analysis and historical contextualization of Rosalind Krauss’s seminal 1976 essay on video art, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” I then compare her essay with a number of present-day interpretations of video art that are in part motivated by a departure from Krauss and identify a range of presuppositions that have persisted through the art historical discourse on video art from the mid-1970s forward. Finally, I demonstrate that the terms of this essentially medium-specific discourse are too limited to offer a satisfying analysis of Good Night Good Morning and argue that understanding Jonas’s work requires an intermedial analysis. / text

<p>The author discusses three Soviet comedies from the</p><p>1970s: Moskva slezam ne verit (Moscow Does Not Believe</p><p>in Tears, Vladimir Menshov, 1979), Osenniy marafon</p><p>(Autumn Marathon, Georgi Daneliya, 1979), and Ironiya</p><p>Sudby, ili S lyogkim parom (Irony of Fate, Eldar</p><p>Ryazanov, 1975), and how they relate to both</p><p>conventions of romance and conventions of the</p><p>mainstream traditions of the romantic comedy genre.</p><p>The text explores the evolution of the genre and</p><p>accompanying theoretic writings, and relates them to</p><p>the Soviet films, focusing largely on the conventions</p><p>that can be grouped under an idea of the romantic</p><p>chronotope. The discussion includes the conventions of</p><p>chance and fate, of the wrong partner, the happy</p><p>ending, the temporary and carnevalesque nature of</p><p>romance, multiple levels of discourse, and some</p><p>aspects of gender, class and power. In addition, some</p><p>attention is paid to the ways in which the films</p><p>connect to specific genre cycles, such as screwball</p><p>comedy and comedy of remarriage, and to the</p><p>implications that a communist system may have on the</p><p>possibilities of love and romance. The author argues</p><p>that Soviet and Hollywood films share many conventions</p><p>of romance, but for differing reasons.</p>